Contributors

Stephen Ball is a Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at UCL, Institute of Education, London UK, an education policy researcher and author of several books on education policy including…
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Bob Lingard is a Professor in the School of Education at The University of Queensland. His most recent books include Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education (Routledge,2014) and Globalizing Education…
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Xavier Bonal is Special Professor in Education and International Development at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor in Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He is Director…
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Angelo Gavrielatos is the Project Director at Educational International (EI) responsible for leading EI's response to the growing commercialisation and privatisation of education.He was the Federal President of the Australian…
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Danaë Desplanques & Romain Chave work at the Education and Solidarity Network, an international organisation which aims at bringing together education, health and social protection players in order to promote…
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Mark Bray is UNESCO Chair Professor in Comparative Education at the University of Hong Kong. Between 2006 and 2010, he was Director in Paris of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational…
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Tanvir Muntasim is the International Policy Manager, Education for ActionAid. His role entails monitoring and engaging with key education related global policy debates, platforms and networks. He previously worked for…
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Antoni Verger is associate professor at the Department ofSociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a researcher of the 'Globalisation, Education and Social Policies' research centre. His main areas…
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Oren Pizmony-Levy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. He holds a PhD in sociology and comparative and international education…
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Fred van Leeuwen is the General Secretary of Education International. Education International represents organisations of teachers and other education employees across the globe.It is the world’s largest federation of unions, representing 30…
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Lee Nordstrum in an independent education research consultant specializing in education finance, demand for schooling and teacher issues in developing countries. He has most recently conducted research and consulted for…
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Blogs and Articles

Articles

Thursday, 08 December 2016
Written by
John Bangs EI Senior Consultant and Martin Henry EI Research Co-ordinator.

The publication of OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA for short, is a triennial world event. Most education news is confined to specialist journals and blogs but when PISA results are announced they are headline news. Why? Because PISA is an evaluation of the quality of countries’ education systems. Its performance tables are scrutinized as closely as football league tables with the difference that it is Ministers who gnash their teeth or celebrate rath ...

I just spent three days in Stockholm with two students at the Sorbonne. They are Aya Hamadeh, a student in computer science, and Mortaza Behboudi, a student in international relations. Both are refugees, the victims of political violence. Mortaza is from Afghanistan and Aya from Syria. Meeting them is to bear witness to the power of the human spirit, to the beauty of human agency and resiliency, to the gift of hope in the face of adversity. Aya and Mortaza are students at the Sorbonne because ...

The United States prides itself on having more than half of the top 100 universities in the world. Ironically, developments in its academic world—particularly among elite universities—have been pushing institutions of higher education increasingly toward structures and practices that defy the values of equity and quality they profess to uphold. This is evident in the considerable stratification of the professoriate into permanent and contingent/casualized ...

African Higher Education has entered a new era. In absence of adequate financing and support measures, the expansion of the student population over the last decades has led to a deterioration of facilities and pedagogic resources in the public sector. Higher education policies also failed to reform academic programmes and curricula, according to evolving local economic needs, making it harder for graduates to enter the job market. This situation has ena ...

Education International recently released a report “Schooling the Poor Profitably” which tells the story of the predatory practices of private for-profit international chains of education providers like Bridge International Academy (BIA). Bridge International Academies (also referred to as ‘Bridge’) aims ‘to be the global leader in providing education to families ...

Earlier this year, on the night of 15th July, there was an attempted coup in Turkey. The coup was quickly defeated and immediately afterwards the government imposed a State of Emergency. The government claims the State of Emergency is intended to defend and stabilise democracy. In reality it provides cover for hugely undemocratic actions aimed at shutting down the government’s critics. Opposition politicians and many journalists have found themselves attacked a ...

On campuses and in communities, from the Americas to Africa, students are at the forefront of demanding a more fairly funded, decolonised, quality education system. Our national contexts may differ, and our campaign slogans might vary - but whether it’s standing up against cuts to student grants in Denmark, or rejecting tuition fee increases in South Africa, students all over the world are facing the same challenges of underfunding and demanding a fairer deal. ...

Big changes are happening in technical vocational education and training, many shared with other education sectors and some shared with other social services. Some of these changes seem to be the result of general social and organisational developments, such as the diffusion of new technologies and globalisation. Others seem to impinge more heavily on vocational education, such as the transfer of responsibility from experts such as vocational teachers to employers, and in many jurisdictions, ...

The Sustainable Development Goal on education establishes ambitious targets and to finance the achievement of these, we need a radical shift, a rebuilding of confidence in the capacity of the governments to fully finance public education that is of good quality – and that can only come from a substantial scaling up of investment. Fundamentally education is a long term investment that requires predictable financing. It is not a short term, one-o ...

With regard to its work in education, UNESCO came into the 2000s hoping to address the issues of legitimacy that had beset it in the preceding decades. From the 1970s onward, UNESCO gradually lost stature as the World Bank became more prominent and influential, though UNESCO’s reputation and the sense of its effectiveness were also adversely affected by the perception that it was too bureaucratized in its operation, ...

Contact information

Education International

Education International is the voice of teachers and other education employees across the globe. A global federation of about 400 unions in more than 170 countries and territories, it represents 30 million teachers and other employees in education from early childhood to university.